Factory conditions for people who make Apple gadgets barely improving

Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in Longhua, China in 2010. Foxconn, a major supplier of Apple was said to be improving workplace conditions. Photo: Bobby Yip

Apple's latest report on the conditions in its supplier factories included an announcement that it was banning "bonded labour" in its supply chain. The move applies to workers who travel across borders and pay to get jobs in its supplier factories.

In the week since the report came out, reaction is already fading. Some industry observers applauded Apple's action and moved on.

But it's worth pausing a second to consider what the somewhat-dry language in Apple's announcement is really talking about. After all, the thing Apple banned would be beyond intolerable to any American worker.

Chinese university students play dead to highlight the cause of Apple factory workers.

The process works like this: Employment agencies recruit workers. They then charge them placement fees for jobs, often in foreign countries such as China. Those fees end up putting workers in debt to the agency. If that wasn't bad enough, according to Apple's own audits, some agencies held the passports of bonded workers in safes until their debts were paid off.

That's right, no passports. That probably means no form of identification, and it certainly means that they can't go home.

It's pretty close to what some might call indentured servitude. And that's what Apple has only just stopped.

This is where we are in 2015.

And before any back-patting commences, it's worth noting that even this step is just a small one, said Scott Nova of the Economic Policy Institute, who co-authored a paper raising questions about Apple's auditing process.

Nova noted that the policy applies only to those who travel across borders to work at Apple supplier factories - not to the Chinese workers at Chinese suppliers, for instance, many of whom also use recruiting agencies.

Nova has other problems with Apple's system. While Apple has made inroads in some areas, it actually saw compliance with overtime rules fall from the previous year. Last year, 92 per cent of workers of factories that the company audited kept to a 60-hour workweek, a decline from 2013 when it was 95 per cent. That's not nearly the levels in 2007, when it was roughly 70 or 80 per cent, but it is a dip.

And, not to overstate the point: These are the problems that we know about, from one company, and only because they are self-reported. It may feel as if the media and activists pick on Apple for disclosing information at all when the same labor conditions have been identified at supplier factories for Samsung, Microsoft and many other tech firms.

"They're all essentially the same," Nova said. "It's just the difference in their public relations management."

Still, there's no doubt that banning this one practice is a step forward, said Dan Viederman of Verite, a labour rights group that has worked with Apple to address these problems. And he gives credit to Apple for even acknowledging the problems.

But the slow pace of change can be frustrating. "We've been working on this for 15 years," he said. "It's a shame that it's taken that long to even get this initial set of companies to act on this issue."

So what could Apple, or any tech company, do to speed things up? Nova suggests a model recently struck with garment workers in Bangladesh, following the horrific factory fires in 2012.

In that country, he said, 200 brands and retailers fashioned an agreement with groups that directly represent workers. The deal calls for independent audits of factory conditions and promises by the retailers to pay to renovate dangerous facilities.

That will cost money, of course, which would eat into the relatively high profit margins that tech companies - and Apple in particular - enjoy.

Improving worker conditions would also probably mean that consumers would have to be okay with slower delivery rates, Nova said. Getting swamped with orders for the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, for example, could have been a reason that Apple's overtime hours went up this past year.

Washington Post

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